@maggiehart I wanted to say hello and welcome you. I found many ways that I could use my own artwork to get me through my fears of major surgery, and to overcome and understand where those fears came from and in doing all that, I deprogrammed my fears. My story is unique in that I was loosing the ability to control my arms and I didn't want to loose my artistic ability that I had worked so hard to achieve, and I needed a surgeon to address the spine problem that was causing it, yet I was very afraid of surgery. I learned how to cope in my self directed art therapy and was completely calm on my surgery day. I am still amazed that I figured out how to do this and that I had this capability within myself. I just needed to believe that I could.

I started talking about it at the beginning of this discussion with this post.
https://connect.mayoclinic.org/comment/221700/
Scroll to the next post and there are some pictures.